A Little Baggage We Carry on the Way to War.

                A Simplified Grammar of War


We are caught in the grammar of war
The subject -predicate curse
Invites stasis
The tomb is neither open nor closed
Just an offending mouth where stands
Fire-breathing Ezekiel drawing
A line in the sand
For all our primitive tribes
And Hector is the crowd-pleaser
Piling high bombast on the cold slab
Cutting the hemispheres in two
Sailing with Ptolemy to the bitter end
Into the cartographer’s dead zone
Where imaginary islands
Occupy the inner eye
And god rules
Over this blessed darkness
Along the rhumb line
Of Cartesian thought
Until this very day
When women are stoned 
To death in Nigeria
For being raped,
Sex is wrapped
In burlap sacks
Buddha is blown into
A blissful kingdom come
Cavemen ride the technical
Wave into New York’s staggering hubris,
All stirring that ancient grammar
Written thick again in the sand
Bringing god out of the tomb
And into the West
Half-shackled by grief and rage
Simmering at ground zero
Resurrected almost daily
In the rainbow fears that wrap the nation
Like burning flesh
At the feet of the faithful
Who must be reborn
In more rigid form
More certain of words and symbols
Worshippers of the old Latin grammar,
The noun shorn of all pretense
The verb ripe for action
A straightforward projection of power
No modifiers
No delays
Just an uneasy ransom
Of the subtle brain
The narrowing of circuits
The defeat of Chomsky 
Generative helix
Where civilization is possible,
The only way out of claustrophobia
Our righteous suburban cul-de-sac
We occupy liked uneasy homesteaders
Bringing into our heads
The daily martial thump of words
That box the compass
Divide a rich geography 
Into this and that
Us and them
Who are the guilty Other
The infidels of our wretched fantasy
Like Iraq that most of us
Cannot find on the map
Nor the Fertile Crescent that
Smolders underneath
Still holding some of our DNA
But we see a market
For hamburgers and Coke
For our fabled can do,
Will do, must do 
Exploration itch
That overlays Persia
Like a black cloud
Heavier now and more ominous
For great good and righteousness
Are in display in the abstract
Words that Hemingway
Warned against, the language
Too far from the heart
Like the honor Falstaff said
Died on Wednesday
Without ribbons and parade
That are singed by an innocence,
We have yet to know
Because we have moved
Too far, too fast
Up the abstraction ladder
Forgetting that we have also
Bathed in the Rio de Merde
And can’t so easily wash
The stench of shit
>From our clothes
Stained by all the excursions we have taken
Confident freedom in hand
Gun-running underneath
Clouded by virtues
That were more certain after 9/11
Exported in our legitimate rage
Like a sure-minded declaration
A simple sentence
About all those not with us
Promising a simple fate
Mirrored in the cavemen of Bora Bora,
Two gods astride a chasm
Our just war theory
Tied at the hip
To our dark-skinned Islamic brothers
Who we project
Feeding their anger
And our purpose
To cut off this medieval appendage
Stuck in the Dark Ages
Where we must go
Shedding what we have gained
On the bloody beaches of Normandy
Taking on thinner skins and
A reed voice burdened by grief
Begging for justice
Demanding final blood from
A country divided, truncated,
Watched by the world
But leaving no footprints
At ground zero, no anthrax in New York
Yet the drum roar continues
The official grammar
Not reaching our synapses
Not generating possibilities
Nor allowing that deep
Subjunctive moment of reflection
For once we cross the Tigris
We have entered history
And will be burdened
By another, more complex grammar
Desperate to speak
In the tones that will survive
Within the oasis of our rage
After the bombs have been dropped
The smoke cleared
And the past seeps into view.